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Just to throw my 2 cents in here. I look at this site as an opportunity to watch a successful trader do his thing in as close to real-time as possible, with a willingness to provide insight and rationale for each trade. I often see a trade discussion open up with an analysis of a trade that has not been made yet, often with a target price and strategy. Follow-on discussions may reveal further information about what makes this a good or poor possibility. This is about as close as someone can reasonably get to posting the trade before it happens. I figure that I'm paying for the ability to watch over Kim's shoulder, and I hope to gain insight into what appears to be a successful trading strategy. I've missed a lot of good trades because I was too cautious in chasing the trade. I have also missed some losers. If I can ride Kim's coattails while I learn and experiment, then I will not complain if I can't do *quite* as well as Kim. Perhaps someday I will. And that is an in-the-trenches sort of education that I am happy to have.

Hi, Just to update on what I've been doing with this trade, I have been trading GLD double calendar instead of Chris's put ratio trade. So I'm currently in the: August 2-August 15 125/128 GLD double calendar My thinking is that unlike Chris, I don't want to have a upward or a downward bias on GLD, want to stay completely delta-neutral; just that its HV will stay about the same while IV can rise a bit. Whenever GLD touches one of my wings in the double calendar, I close that wing for a profit and then open another wing that's further away, so to keep GLD constantly inside the calendar's tent, I originally started with a 128/130 GLD double calendar but adjust my wings several times down to 125/128, I plan to roll up the whole calendar structure to: August 16-August 30 delta neutral double calendar on August 2 expiration date, Best, PC P.S. For adjustment, https://www.tradeking.com/education/videos/adjusting-calendar-spreads I have found this video by Dan Sheridan to be helpful. Just skip the first 30 minutes as it's a lot of basic option stuff.

Hi, In my humble opinion, trade alerts are the least valuable thing in any newsletter. Price move, liquidity in options are not so great, you are stuck in a meeting and by the time you get back to your desk, the price has moved on. For a slightly off-the-topic but relevant topic about edge and learning about trading, When I started trading, I thought the holy grail is to find an edge through some kind of statistical anomaly in complicated products or identifying the next Google. In another words, I cared a lot about trade entry. I had a huge ego and I worked with similarly full-of-themselves co-workers who had graduated from MIT to build machine-learning tools and backtesters to find the perfect conditions to enter a trade. We reasoned, "if we only if we could build the perfect correlation model between Southwest stock and Crude oil, or if the option skew is off by 0.50% in a OTM option strike in a really long-dated month, we could arbitrage this and make millions," Now the older I get, the dumber I realize that I am and I only hope to accelerate this learning of realizing how dumb I'm. I realize that I don't have the speed as the nimble high frequency trading companies who co-located their trading servers right to the exchange, my account is an speck of sand compared to the hedge fund/prop desks on Wall Street who can move mountains and my brain is a pea in comparison to the combination of econometrics/statistical analysis performed by those with Astrophysics PhD quants. I know nothing about the market and when I make a feeble attempt to guess where it's going, it's as good as a monkey's. So to protect myself from myself, I consider risk management and what-to-do after you enter a trade to be the most important. I follow about half of Kim's trades and honestly, he has had some bad trades (sorry Kim, but no one is immune to statistics). But honestly his good trades/performance doesn't interest me, a monkey can guess correctly some of the time how a stock is range-bound and put on a iron condor and it'll get profitable most of the time. But the one time when it fails, it can wipe you out of the market for good. So honestly, I perk up when I see how Kim reacts to his bad trades, like the AAPL August calendar or the August RUT iron condor. There's no fun in watching someone pick up pennies in front of a slow moving steam-roller but it's more fun to see how they react when they are about to get run over - they get squashed completely or they manage a daring escape; either way, it'll be a poignant lesson for me as a bystander. More concretely, what I learned from SO is: trade adjustment, what to do when the stock moves against you; how to adjust your trade to still keep a favorable risk-reward ratio; overall portfolio management, how to balance your vega, delta positive trades against your negative one's to keep the whole porfolio as neutral as possible; thinking about risk, not to get hung up or married to a single position and learn to when to fold them and keep a steady routine of trade identification, trade management, trade exit and calm regardless of wild portfolio swings Best, PC